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THE WORLD CAN BARELY CONTAIN Haegue Yang. Since the mid-1990s, the Korean artist has navigated the streets of Seoul and the boulevards of Berlin with equal ease. Her installations, for which she is best known, follow suit. Although composed of such quotidian objects as venetian blinds and packing crates, they likewise move through a vast array of references, from Marguerite Duras to Marcel Broodthaers. Yang’s latest exhibition, too, was both a journey and a return, since the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis was the first US institution to show her works, in 2007.

Featuring a succinct collection of mostly small-scale pieces made in the last few years, the show lacked something in size and pomp but more than made up for this in the timeliness and scope of its tacit message. Yang poses nothing less than the problem of formalism: What is its place within today’s supposedly globalized